Tag Archives: fitness

In my last post I introduced the iHealth activity tracker. I gave my review of how usable, convenient and useful it was for me. This month I’m going to focus on how specifically it can help you be more active and help you start to build some habits around fitness.

During my testing of the device, I found a few of it’s abilities quite useful for helping to improve your activity level. The three key features I like are 1) setting goals 2) idle alarms and 3) partner integrations. Let me break them down:

1) Setting Goals

Within the iPhone app you are able to set your daily step goals. By default, this setting is set to 10,000 steps per day. This is an average number for an average person, however, this doesn’t mean it’s the right goal for you. This is an important piece! Most people take less than 5000 steps per day so to jump right to double that might not be ideal.

To best set your own personal goal, I suggest tracking your activity for a few days. Calculate your average daily steps and then add 500-1000 as your first goal. Once you can reach that goal consistently, you can increase it by another 500-1000 steps per day. The fun part is in the daily view. In the tracker, it shows your daily progress with a cute little frog on a podium. As you progress through the day you go from the ground, to 3rd, 2nd and finally 1st place!

2) Idle Alarms

This feature surprised me when I first set it up, literally! The idle alarm is a special alarm that goes off any time you are idle for the given amount of time. So, if you’ve been sitting at your desk for hours, the alarm will go off and tell you to get up and be active. You can set it for hours or even minutes. I played with it at 30 minutes for a while to remind me to at least stand up and stretch my body a bit a couple of times per hour. You’ll be surprised with how quickly 30 minutes of sitting can go by!

3) Partner Integrations

Through your iHealth web account, you can link your account to other services. The one I love most is of course Evernote, however, you can also link to your RunKeeper account or your MyFitnessPal account. By linking your device to these services, iHealth will automatically sync your data to those accounts. This is great for activity and calorie monitoring on those platforms. This integration allows you to keep
a bigger picture eye on things and easily keep all your data linked in one place.

I’d love to hear about your success. Has using an activity tracker helped you increase your activity and fitness?

Activity trackers are small devices that we wear on our body to track our activity throughout our day. Usually these devices track data like steps taken, distance travelled, and calories burned. iHealth’s tracker also has the ability to track your sleep quality at night, set daily goals and even notify you when you are being inactive.

The goal is to gather data that builds a picture of your daily activity. This is actually a very popular thing and there’s even a movement titled Quantified Self where people are looking to gain self knowledge through self tracking.

Anyway, back to the iHealth activity tracker.

I’ve been testing it out personally so I can see how well it would work with my clients. I wanted to see 1) how easy it was to use, 2) how convenient it was to wear and 3) whether or not I found the data useful. Here are my findings.

1) How easy is it to use?

Use of the device was actually very simple for me. It only has one button, so it can’t get much easier than this. Pressing the button cycles through the different measurements of steps, distance, calories and a fun little graphic that shows you how close you are to your daily goal by a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place podium.

The other use of the device is through bluetooth connection to your iPhone. For me, this process went exactly as outlined in their manual. However, for Kelly (who was also testing a device) she had much more difficulty. We were actually un-able to connect the device to her phone and had to set it up with her iPad. (I played with it for an hour and couldn’t figure it out. We did not contact customer support)

Once connected to my phone, it was very simple. In the iHealth App, all I had to do was click on the Activity section and it would connect to the device and sync. All the data was there in a nice pretty graph that was easy to read.

2) How convenient is it to wear?

The iHealth tracker comes with both a wrist strap and a waist clip. I found I was wearing the wrist strap more often because I like to wear a watch. However, it’s not really a replacement for my watch, so often it appeared like I was wearing two watches.

It’s great to have the wrist and waist options, but this created a small problem. The waist clip is better during the day when tracking steps, but the wrist strap is better at night when tracking sleep. The problem comes in when switching between the two. I’m not sure if it was just me and my large fingers, but I found it challenging to switch the device around, especially when taking it out of the waist clip.

3) Was the data useful?

I wore the activity tracker for a couple of weeks and got a lot of data. Data about my steps in a day, data about my sleep at night, and even data about how often I’d forget to wear it. The data was interesting and even a little surprising at times. I realized that some days I didn’t walk nearly as much as I thought.

I found that the data got less exciting over time. I started to see my averages, I started to see the trends, and day after day, week after week, it didn’t tell me much that was new. So, I was less motivated to keep wearing it once I knew my trends. However, I think my opinion is very skewed in this aspect.

I believe these trackers are best for someone who isn’t very active. Because I am very active, this data wasn’t really new information for me. I already exercise regularly and get frequent activity. The activity tracker seemed to show me what I already knew, and to have a few days of lower activity isn’t a concern for me.

However, if you’re someone who isn’t very active and spends a lot of time at the desk, this little device can be an amazing tool. There are a few key features that can really help you focus on being more active, and help you start to build some habits around fitness.

Stay tuned for my future post about what these key features are and how you can use them to start increasing your activity level!

Have you used an activity tracker before? What was your experience using it?

Depending where you live, June is a month where the weather starts to get a lot nicer and more people are getting outside. Walking is a great way to get your day started or even finih it off so you can burn those “desert calories”. Fortunately for most, walking is a pretty simple activity that requires little equipment. In a way, you just get up and go!

As an online fitness coach, I’m always looking for ways to use technology to help people be more active. Since most people nowadays have a smart phone and carry it with them everywhere, it can be a great too for tracking your fitness. Do a quick search in the app store and you’ll find many apps that are great for tracking your walking and even steps throughout the day.

One if these apps I’ve been testing out lately is called Moves. It uses the accelerometers of the phone to track your steps and the GPS to track where you go. It connects Foursquare, a location tagging program, that allows you to check in and get recommendations for the places you visit. This combination allows you to accurately track where you go each day. They’ve also done a pretty good job with their display, so at the end of the day you see where you’ve been, how long it took, how many steps you took and even how far you’ve travelled. Like magic, it even seems to know when I’m cycling!

However, tracking where you’ve been and how many steps is only great if you’re actually walking and going places. The key is how will this app motivate you to keep moving?

When it comes to motivation, it’s all about goals. If you don’t know your destination, how motivated are you to get up and start walking? I suggest setting a daily, weekly and even monthly goal for your tracking in Moves. This can be the minimum steps or miles you want to achieve daily. I suggest aiming for at least 5000-7500 steps per day to start. Once this goal is set, check in to the app daily to see how you’re stacking up. Some days you’ll find that you blow your goal out of the water, while other days may require a late night walk just to get your minimum.

Bottom line, apps can be great tools for tracking your fitness, but if you’re not setting goals, you won’t stay motivated to use them and push yourself.